


The Portrait Hole

by OgdensOldFirewhiskey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Forgiveness, Friendship, I'm Sorry, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kings Cross, Missing Scene, POV Severus Snape, Reconciliation, Regret, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26966239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OgdensOldFirewhiskey/pseuds/OgdensOldFirewhiskey
Summary: Snape's version of "King's Cross" -- a conversation with Lily, featuring angst, growth, and forgiveness. Canon-compliant, Snape POV.“But then why are we at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower?”Her eyebrows shot up in apparent surprise. “Merlin, is that where we are?”She was being so evasive, but he couldn’t find it within himself to be irritated with her for it, so astonished was he to speak to her again. “That’s what it looks like to me.”She seemed to find this amusing. “Perhaps death is showing you the House you should’ve belonged to, then. I always told you.”“Or maybe,” he suggested sardonically, “It’s showing me the place where it all went wrong.”She sighed, her eyes glinting with unspoken sadness and exhaustion. “It can’t all be boiled down to that one moment, surely?”He had so many things he wanted to say to her. He’d had seventeen years to practice what he’d say to her if he had the chance. But, just as they had on that fateful evening after OWLs so many moons ago, in the face of her disappointment his words and paltry explanations felt wholly inadequate. “No,” he agreed instead. “My mistakes transcend a single moment, it’s true. But that one felt unusually pivotal.”
Relationships: Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape
Comments: 5
Kudos: 47





	The Portrait Hole

The pain, which had been agonizing not moments before, was receding now. He felt as though he were floating to another plane entirely.

The one thing grounding him still to earth was the boy.

He’d let his memories of her spill over, along with those that were necessary for the boy to do what must now be done. The boy had collected them, poured the sum of his life unceremoniously into a minuscule vial. He was nearly empty now, of blood, of memory, of mind.

With great effort, he whispered the words he knew would be his last. “Look… at… me…”

He forced his vision to clear for the final time, to find purchase in the emerald green eyes, and imagined that they were hers.

And then, he was gone.

***************

He listened to the peaceful silence around him, the panic and pain that had so consumed him feeling as though from another life. He was warm.

He didn’t know how long he lay there, only that it slowly came to him that he was laying on some sort of surface, and that he must exist in some form. Had Nagini’s venom failed to kill him, somehow?

He opened his eyes slowly, to find that his surroundings were blindingly, pearly white. He was naked, and felt immediately uncomfortable for it. He’d always felt entirely too vulnerable without clothing, even in solitude. Before he could fully form the desire to clothe himself, robes appeared before him.

As he pulled them on, he took stock of himself. He felt stronger, more energized than he had done, though there were still some aches and pains. He stared at his surroundings, which seemed to be taking form around him as he looked. He was in some sort of hallway, with a spiral staircase off to one side. Figures began to form – what looked like a coat of arms took shape, and lanterns and portraits began to adorn the walls.

He was in the castle, he realized. His confusion intensified. He had not been inside the castle when Nagini had bitten him, so why did he find himself here, now? Had somebody transported him here? The boy, perhaps?

What was more, he did not immediately recognize where, precisely in the castle he was. It was not a place he came frequently, that much he knew, for he would recognize the familiar curve of the dungeons, of the steps to the library in an instant.

He had just decided that someone must have stowed his body away in a far forgotten corner of the castle, believing him to be dead, when he heard her.

“Hi, Sev.”

He whipped around to see her emerging from the portrait in the wall behind him.

“Lily,” he breathed, his heart panging at the sight of her. He had not imagined he would ever set eyes on her again, and he drank her in as though he were dying of thirst. She looked older than he had remembered her to be, though he supposed he had not seen her in the flesh for many years by the time she had died. But her eyes were the same, the slight upturn of her beautiful lips, the tumbling waves of dark red hair. She had always been breathtakingly beautiful, and he was transfixed. She brushed her hair from her face in a manner of such familiarity that he nearly wept for it. His eyes traced her features as though he were trying to memorize them anew. “I – I don’t understand. Where are we?”

She shrugged. “Only you know that, Sev.”

It wasn’t like her to speak in such enigmatic riddles. She had always been direct, straightforward. It was something he’d always admired about her. “Am I dead?”

At this, she pressed her lips together, her eyes showing him sympathy for the first time. “Yes,” she answered simply, “Voldemort killed you. Well, technically Nagini did, but I don’t imagine you care much about the specifics at the moment, do you?”

He felt himself smile at the familiar dryness. He felt nearly nothing at the confirmation of his death. He had been expecting it for a long time. He looked around again, and comprehension dawned on him as he recognized the plump woman in the portrait from behind which Lily had emerged. “But then why are we at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower?”

Her eyebrows shot up in apparent surprise. “Merlin, is that where we are?”

She was being so evasive, but he couldn’t find it within himself to be irritated with her for it, so astonished was he to speak to her again. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

She seemed to find this amusing. “Perhaps death is showing you the House you should’ve belonged to, then. I always told you.”

“Or maybe,” he suggested sardonically, “It’s showing me the place where it all went wrong.”

She sighed, her eyes glinting with unspoken sadness and exhaustion. “It can’t all be boiled down to that one moment, surely?”

He had so many things he wanted to say to her. He’d had seventeen years to practice what he’d say to her if he had the chance. But, just as they had on that fateful evening after OWLs so many moons ago, in the face of her disappointment his words and paltry explanations felt wholly inadequate. “No,” he agreed instead. “My mistakes transcend a single moment, it’s true. But that one felt unusually pivotal.”

Her face hardened. “I didn’t want to come here, you know.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He hardly knew what ‘here’ was, never mind who or what had enforced her appearance. “Then why did you come?”

“Because somebody had to,” she said. “And because… you did try to protect him.”

He didn’t need to ask to whom she was referring. “I tried,” he agreed. “For you.”

She sniffed at that, her eyes flashing dangerously. “And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

He thought he knew what she meant. He felt an old impulse to try to convince her that his intentions had been pure, but he felt instinctually that she knew the truth already and that any attempts would be futile at best, damaging at worst. “If it matters,” he offered finally, “it wasn’t wholly for you, in the end.”

“Who else was it for, then?” she asked, her voice still hard.

It was funny, the burdens he’d been carrying with him for the length of his miserable life felt lighter here, though not as light as he might have hoped they would feel in death. He felt them pull at him now. “With time, I came to… respect a great many people. Albus. Minerva. Filius. By the end, I don’t think I agreed with the Dark Lord at all. So it was for them, too.”

Her beautiful eyes searched him, though what she was looking for he couldn’t say. “And what of the others? The Weasleys? Remus?” Her eyes filled with tears as she continued, “The McKinnons? The Prewetts? Benjy Fenwick? You went to school with or taught nearly all of them. Did their lives not matter to you?”

“I would be lying to you if I pretended I lost sleep over them at the time,” he said, his heart feeling heavier still, “but they matter to me now.”

She seemed to struggle to keep her composure. “What about Sirius? What about James? What about _me_?”

The old familiar agony swept through him. The guilt. The leaden remorse that weighed him down like an anchor. “You must know,” he pleaded, failing to keep the emotion from his voice, “that I have suffered every day for what I—”

“For _what_ , exactly?” she hissed. “For causing my death so you couldn’t have me for yourself? How neat it would have been for you, if he’d killed James and Harry but left me all alone. That was what you intended, isn’t it?”

He sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands. “I loved you,” he groaned. “I loved you every minute of every day from the moment I met you.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said, her voice so scathing that he looked up at her in surprise.

She seemed to know so much, so it seemed unfathomable to him that she could fail to understand that which felt fundamental to it all. “I did. I do. Everything was to make it up to you, to repay the cost of what—”

“Don’t you dare tell me you love me,” she said, the tears spilling over and cascading down her cheeks. She didn’t bother to brush them away. “I don’t know what you think love is, but joining a murderer who wants to annihilate me and everyone like me doesn’t feel like love to me. Orchestrating the deaths of every single person _I love_ doesn’t feel like love to me.”

They were back here again. He may as well have been fifteen years old, standing outside of the portrait hole, begging Lily to realize that he hadn’t meant to call her the M-word. He didn’t have an adequate defense for his behavior then, and he didn’t now. “Can you… will you… allow me to try to explain?”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks. He hated that after all this time he was still hurting her, perhaps had never stopped hurting her. “Fine,” she agreed.

She sunk to the ground as well, so that they were sitting across from one another, their backs against opposite walls. She hugged her knees to her chest, and Severus remembered the many times they had sat like this in their childhood together, planning and plotting for an exciting future that they would never share.

“You have every right to despise me,” he said, hating the thought that she might. “But you cannot despise me more than I despise myself.”

She sniffed again, but did not comment. Her eyes were staring blankly at the space of floor that separated them.

“I was bitter, and selfish, and small,” he admitted, feeling a greater distance from that part of himself than he ever had before, so that it didn’t feel odd at all to admit. “I was an angry child, and an angrier teenager. I was angry at a world in which I never seemed to fit. I was angry that everyone seemed to have a place but there never seemed a place for me. Not in Slytherin. Not at home.

“The only place I ever felt at home was with you,” he admitted. It felt surreal, to say this all to her now. It would have been a revelation to have told her this when it had mattered. Now, they were both dead, and she married to someone else at that. But there was an ache to it, a bald truth that felt good to admit aloud. “The only time I felt worthwhile was when I was with you. You’re… remarkable in that way. You see the good in everyone, even if… even if there is hardly any good to see.”

She looked up at him then, her eyes slightly softer.

“But I quickly learned that I couldn’t find home in my House, riddled with soon-to-be Death Eaters, and hang round with the muggle-born Gryffindor girl. And I never bothered to try to reconcile the fact that the horrible things I was saying to fit in with them could have also applied to you.”

He breathed deeply. “And so I lost you. Here,” he gestured vaguely to the corridor in which they sat, “but not really. I think I lost you long before then, around when I lost the part of myself that you’d managed to like.”

“That part wasn’t ever lost,” she said, and he could have cried. She was comforting him. He had killed her, and she was comforting him. He could have lived a million lives over and never deserved her.

“And so I wrapped myself in the hate and the rhetoric, because I belonged, and because I felt powerful, and because the people whom I’d always hated…” he didn’t think it wise to mention her husband, “seemed to naturally oppose me.”

“I was weak,” he stated. “I was pathetic. And I killed you.”

He felt the agonized tears spill. “I killed you, it was my fault, all my fault. I’ve never felt pain like that. I tried to protect you, I tried, I begged Dumbledore to protect you, I did everything I could but… he killed you anyway, and you were gone.”

Lily was crying too. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said harshly. “I was there.”

He realized too late that in his rush to explain himself to her, to feel her understanding and forgiveness that he had so craved, he hadn’t truly considered that he was apologizing directly to her for robbing her of the life she should have lived. He had always considered her death in terms of what he had lost, for what it meant for him to live in a world where she wasn’t. Seeing her, now, in front of him, quietly weeping, he fully realized what he had cost her.

The thought rankled at him, made him feel as though he were coming undone at the seams. He was seeing himself with greater clarity than life had ever allowed. Had he truly never thought about the grief she must feel at dying at the age of 21? All the things she had wanted to do, all that she had wanted to be? The opportunity to watch her son grow? Had he truly only ever considered his own loss?

She noticed his silence, and broke it. “Do you want me to offer you forgiveness? Is that what you’re asking for, from me?”

He didn’t know what he was asking for. “You wanted to be a Healer,” he said, instead.

She looked at him as though he were mad. “Yes, I did.”

“You wanted to travel to Paris,” he continued, meeting her gaze. “You always said.”

Vague understanding swept across her face. “I did.”

“Did you ever go?”

Her green eyes pierced him. “No.”

“What… what else?” he asked quietly. “What else did you want?”

The question seemed to startle her. She began slowly, deliberately, staring off into the middle distance with a bit of a wistful smile on her face. “I wanted to learn to cook, I was always shit at it. I wanted to go to a Quidditch World Cup one day. And I always thought it would have been bloody amazing to be the first muggle-born to be published in _Practical Potioneer_.”

She paused, but he sensed that he should not interrupt. She seemed to struggle for words. Finally, she turned her gaze to him, all wistfulness gone. “I wanted to grow old with James. I wanted to bake Harry a different sort of cake for every single birthday. I wanted to be a dead embarrassing mother and force him to give me a hug on the platform well past third year. I wanted to watch him…” her voice caught, but she persisted, “I wanted to watch him get married and have children and…” she seemed overcome, and did not continue.

“I took that from you,” he said finally, the weight of it threatening to overwhelm him.

“Not you alone,” she said, her eyebrows knitting together with concern at the look on his face. “Voldemort did.”

“You were right, before,” he continued, hardly listening to whatever paltry defense she had offered him.

She gave him a small, watery smile. “I usually am. But when, specifically?”

“I didn’t love you. Well, not in the way you should. The love I felt for you was selfish.”

She opened her mouth, but then closed it again. This, more than anything else he had said, seemed to leave her speechless. In truth, he had shocked himself with it. He felt unmoored, rocked to his very core. That he was consumed by his love for Lily had formed the cornerstone of all that he thought he was since the age of ten. He had never stopped to examine it or consider it or evaluate it for what it was, because it felt so constant and enduring.

But what he had said was true. He had been confused and angry at her refusal to reenter a friendship with him because he had felt he had earned it from her, never considering the pain his views must have caused her. He had felt hitherto unimagined bitterness at her relationship with James bloody Potter because it meant that she had not loved _him_. He had never paused to consider that he might have made her happy. He had begged for Dumbledore to protect her, not caring whether her son and husband lived or died, because in truth he didn’t stop to wonder how she would feel about it. He had treated her son with cold disdain because he reminded him too much of his father, even though he knew she would have hated him for it.

It felt all so clear, so plain looking at it now, as though a fog had been lifted from his brain and he was able to consider himself with an unknown objectivity.

“It was,” she agreed finally, looking at him as though she had never truly seen him before.

“I’m sorry for that,” he said finally, truthfully, after this revelation had crashed over him and he was left in the settling waves. “You were better to me than I deserved, and I was so selfish. I don’t think I realized that fully until just now.” He pulled at his hair, softer and less greasy than it had been in life. Remorse and guilt wracked his voice as he croaked, “I’m sorry for what I’ve cost you, the pain I’ve caused you and your family. I’m sorry you never got to go to Paris, or become a Healer, or be a mother.”

She tilted her head and considered him for a long moment, her eyes narrowed slightly. “You know, I fully expected to come here and thank you for protecting Harry and not much else,” she admitted ruefully. “I didn’t think any apology from you would mean anything to me. And I thought you’d apologize for all the wrong things. But I really needed to hear you say that, I think.”

“And I do owe you my gratitude,” she continued. “You’ve done so much for Harry. You put your life at risk, and died so that he might have a chance to live. You’ve been so brave. Whether that was entirely for me or for some ever-changing perspective on good and evil, you protected him. He wouldn’t be alive now if it weren’t for you.

“So…” she extended her delicate hand into the space between them decisively. “I forgive you. And thank you, for my son.”

He extended his own and grasped hers tightly, searching her face and her eyes and feeling, for the first time, what it might mean to love her truly without a cloud of selfish bitterness. It was achingly beautiful and breathtakingly painful. But it was sweet. “You forgive me, just like that?”

She winked. “I’m dead. I’m allowed to be otherworldly and gracious.”

“You were always those.”

“Well, now I’m a bit extra, with a some omniscience thrown in.”

He released her hand and stared at her. How had he ever been so lucky, that she had lived around the corner from him as a child? He would never have known what it meant to be cared for or to care for someone else without her. He hated to think that he’d never brought her any of the joy she’d brought him.

“Why were you ever my friend?” he asked her.

She peered at him thoughtfully. Her hesitation might have been painful, but he supposed it was fair. After a few deliberative moments, she answered. “You were smart, and witty. And bloody creative, making up spells and changing Potions around… you pushed me to be a better witch, to think differently.” She smiled, a small, nostalgic smile that made his heart ache. “And you’ll always be the person who made me believe in magic.”

He didn’t have words for how this made him feel. Perhaps it was hope. Not for them, not for any notion that she might feel about him what he felt for her. But perhaps hope for himself. “Thank you,” he said.

They sat in silence for what might have been only a few moments, or perhaps several minutes. It didn’t seem important.

“You said you’ve a bit of omniscience thrown in?” he asked her eventually.

She nodded.

“So you know what happens next, then?”

She smiled, a true smile that seemed to light up her whole face, and he felt whole for the first time since perhaps he had seen her swinging high on the muggle swing-set a lifetime ago. “Ah, right, I haven’t told you anything, have I?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ve got a bit of a choice ahead of you.”

“A choice?”

“Yes. You said we’re at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower?”

He nodded. “You can’t see that?”

She ignored him. “So then you could, I imagine, come with me through the portrait hole. Or you could go back.”

“What do you mean, go back?”

“As a ghost,” she explained simply.

“Through the portrait hole,” he said immediately. He had absolutely nobody he had any desire to see that was left in life, and did not fancy an eternity of loneliness and bitterness. He’d had enough of that in life. “But what’s through there?”

She offered him a small smile. “That isn’t for me to explain. But it’s peaceful, there.”

“Will you be there?” he asked hopefully. He had never imagined any sort of afterlife, but now that he was faced with the prospect of one, he couldn’t imagine one that didn’t include her.

She hesitated. “I will be. But so will James. And Sirius. And Remus. And you need to know that I truly love him. James, I mean. I always wondered whether you thought I was with him just to spite you, or something awful like that. But I never was. He makes me happy.”

This didn’t cause him as much pain as it once might have done. There was a familiar wrench in his guts and a deflation in his chest, but it wasn’t nearly as sharp or as agonizing as it used to be. It felt much harder, to be bitter about it all, here.

“I know,” he answered, and he truly did. “I’m glad…” he struggled around the lump in his throat, “I’m glad you’re happy.”

“Thank you, Sev.” The moniker and the smile on her face felt like sunshine on a warm summer’s day. He felt much lighter than he had when he’d first awoken, as though some burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

She pulled open the portrait hole and gestured for him to follow; and together they climbed through into the misty fog.


End file.
